The Traveler

by John Katzenbach

  Martin Jeffers remembered staring at the dead bird in his brother’s hands.

  No wonder he hated him so much. You can’t be born with a hatred like that. You have to construct it carefully out of cruelty and neglect, first removing any love or affection. That’s what he’d told the therapist. He’d asked the woman poised behind his head where he couldn’t see her, If you’d had a father like that, wouldn’t you want to become someone who cared about people? Someone who tried to help people? Why the hell do you think I’m here?

  And, of course, the therapist said nothing.

  The layered memories boiled about in Martin Jeffers’ mind.

  Sonuvabitch, sonuvabitch, sonuvabitch.

  No one said a word that night. No one ever said a thing. We all sat at the dinner table and acted like nothing had happened. He remembered his mother looking over at Doug and him and saying, I’m sorry the bird flew away. Both boys had adopted the same disbelieving stare, and she’d finally averted her eyes and nothing more was said. She never knew a damn thing, he’d told the therapist. She just primped and preened and was forever touching them, especially with wet, nerve-racking kisses, and she never knew a damn thing about anything and if you tried to tell her, she just turned away.

  Their father just thrust food into his mouth.

  Sonuvabitch.

  Martin Jeffers rocked back in his seat. He saw himself again that morning as he fell from sleep’s pinnacle at the sound of his brother’s voice, awak­ening to the sight of the dead bird in his brother’s hands. The bird was stiff and broken.

  Then, in his memory, he just saw his brother’s hands.

  Then he thought: Ohmigod!

  He said it out loud though there was no one near to hear him: “Ohmigod! No!”

  He felt the force of memory crushed by his thought, like an exceptionally heavy weight loaded onto his shoulders.

  “Oh no. Oh no, oh no,” he said to himself.

  In an instant his mind filled with black sadness and horror.

  And he realized suddenly, right at that moment, who’d killed the bird.

  I am timid, thought Martin Jeffers.

  Somehow all these things happened to the two of us and I became quiet and introverted and lonely and passive and he became . . . Jeffers stopped himself before putting a word to it.

  He pictured his brother in his mind’s eye and saw his loose, flushed, grinning face. He forced himself to see his brother at moments of anger and he remembered the force of Douglas Jeffers’ silences. Those had always scared him. He recalled pleading with his brother to speak to him, to talk to him. He thought of the detective and the crime-scene photographs of her niece and he tried to reconcile the two visions.

  He shook his head.

  Not Doug, he thought.

  Then he had a worse thought: Why not?

  He could not answer the question.

  Martin Jeffers stood up and walked about his apartment. He lived on the ground floor of an old house in Pennington, New Jersey, a tiny town tucked between Hopewell and Trenton’s suburbs. Hopewell was just to the west of Princeton, and Martin Jeffers recalled with displeasure that whenever anyone mentioned Hopewell, even when they had been growing up, his brother had always reminded whoever was listening that the little, sleepy town was famous for one thing: It was the place where Lindbergh’s baby had been stolen.

  The crime of the century, Martin Jeffers thought.

  He felt cold and stepped to his window. He put his hand against the screen and felt the late-summer warmth. Still, he shivered, and pushed the window down sharply, leaving only a crack open.

  They found the baby in the woods, he thought. Decomposed.

  He wondered for an instant whether every state marked its history with crimes. He was taken aback when he realized how much his brother knew. He remembered Doug talking about the Camden Killer, who had walked out on a warm early September day in 1949 and calmly shot and killed thirteen people with a war souvenir Luger. A few years back, Doug had been fascinated to learn that his brother frequently saw this person the papers once described as a mad dog as he peacefully roamed the halls of Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, a model patient for more than twenty-five years, never arguing when the orderlies came about with the daily dosage of Thorazine, Mellaril, or Haldol. Vitamin H, the patients called it. The Camden Killer always took his without complaint. Not even a whimper of protest.

  Doug was always interested in that sort of thing.

  Martin Jeffers shook his head.

  Yeah, but so was that police reporter from the Philadelphia paper who came up to do a story about the hospital. And you tell it at every stupid seminar or convention you go to. A lot of people remember that crime.

  That was the problem, he thought. People are always fascinated by crimes. And it was natural for his brother to be intrigued by them. Hell, he’d spent so much time chasing cops and robbers with his camera, it was natural he was interested.

  He paused.

  But how interested?

  He shook his head again. Denial, he thought.

  Ridiculous.

  You know your brother, he told himself.

  He put his head in his hands.

  He could not cry. He could not feel anything save a disjointed confusion.

  Do you really? he asked himself.

  He thought of the men in his therapy group. He suddenly envisioned his brother sitting among them. Then, just as quickly, he saw himself there as well.

  He turned away from the window, as if by walking across the room he could change the view in his mind.

  “Dammit!” he said out loud. “Goddammit to hell!”

  He thought of his father and his mother.

  “How could you love them?” he said.

  He thought of his woman therapist. There had been an abstract painting on one wall of her office, a Kandinsky reproduction, all brightly colored angles and shapes with dots floating about a snow-white background. Across from it had been a Wyeth print, a muted picture of a barn caught in grays and browns in the wan early evening light. American Realism. He had always been struck by the juxtaposition of the two pictures, but never had managed to ask the woman why she had selected them and placed them where they were. “Well,” she had asked, “do you think you loved your real mother and father?”

  “They worked in a circus! A drunk and a whore!” he had blurted out in angry response. “They abandoned each other and then they abandoned us! I was only three or four . . . I did not know them. How can you love something or someone that you don’t know?”

  She didn’t answer that, of course.

  And he knew the answer anyway.

  It’s easy. The mind creates something to love out of the slightest memory of a touch, a sound, a sensation.

  He thought then of the corollary.

  The mind can also create something to hate.

  He stepped over to a small desk in a corner of what passed for his living room, really a room filled with papers, clutter, paperback novels, classic novels, medical texts and reports, magazines, a couple of chairs and a sofa, a television and telephone. He looked around at his things. They are cheap. The meager belongings of someone living a meager life. He looked down at the desktop and saw an envelope stuck in the corner of the desk blotter. On it was written in his own handwriting, Doug’s apartment key.

  He remembered his brother tossing the key to him so casually. A sentimental journey, he said.

  Nothing is an accident.

  Everything is part of some scheme. Conscious or unconscious. He picked up the key in the envelope and held it. He shook his head. Not yet, he said. I’m not convinced. I’m not persuaded. I’m not intruding. Not yet.

  He recognized this feeling for the lie it was.

  Then he dropped the envelope back on
his desk and returned to an easy chair. He glanced at a clock. It was well past midnight. Sleep, he said to himself. He dropped into the chair, knowing that he would not.

  He thought of the detective.

  Martin Jeffers tried to imagine the forces that drove her. He thought, for an instant, that she was somehow pure; that the only true motivation was justice. If this took the form of war or revenge or anger, it was still honest. Even murder? he wondered to himself. He did not formulate an answer, but he knew: I would not trust anyone who turned the other cheek. Modern psychiatry does not recognize such selfless altruism. Again the detective elbowed her way into his consciousness. He saw her face set, unsmiling, filled with terrifying determination, her hair thrust back severely. What is so frightening, he thought, is that she does not carry herself like a man. A woman detective. She ought to be edged in granite, some middle-aged, bureaucratic type, with farm woman’s hands and monocular vision of the world. Detective Barren wears silks and not very sensible shoes and she frightens me all the more. Women do not, as a rule, pursue their quarry all across the United States. They are not motivated by the senseless and stupid egos of insult and outrage like men. They are more worldly, more understanding.

  He smiled and thought how silly he was being.

  Lesson One, Day One, Medical School: Don’t generalize. Don’t characterize.

  The words obsession and compulsion thrust themselves into his mind, but he was momentarily confused. He considered his brother, the detective, then himself.

  It was no wonder, he thought then, that the ancient Greeks invented the Furies and that they were women. His memory tumbled through myth and fantasy. Even if I were to blind myself, I would still see.

  Martin Jeffers stared across the room, watching the clock, scared of the night, waiting for the morning, desperately wanting to return to the routine of his life: the morning shower, the quick cup of coffee, the drive to the hospital, the first series of daily rounds and the regular sessions of his group and then his patients, knocking in their tentative way at his office door. He wanted everything to return suddenly to normal. The way it was, the way it was before today happened. He realized how childish the wish was and smiled to himself: I wish I were back in Kansas, back in Kansas, Kansas . . . He closed his eyes and laughed halfheartedly at the memory joke, but knew nothing would change when he opened them. There are no magic slippers, he thought. No heels to click together three times. He suddenly remembered his brother’s description of his work: on the heels of evil.

  He got up, went to a closet, and pulled a winter comforter from a shelf. He wrapped it around his shoulders and sat back down in the chair. He switched off the bright light on a coffee table next to him and sat quietly in the darkness, wanting to be awake, wanting to be asleep, caught between the two, each an equally terrifying prospect.

  Outside, in her car, Detective Mercedes Barren saw the light extinguished. She waited fifteen minutes, to be certain that Martin Jeffers did not leave the apartment. Then she put the seat back as far as it would go and tugged a thin blanket appropriated from her hotel room over her. She double-checked to make sure the doors were locked, but the window cracked to the cool night air. Pennington, she thought, is a place of absolute safety, of families and neighbors and backyard barbecues. She remembered visiting the tree-lined streets on high-school football weekends. He doesn’t know, she thought. He doesn’t know that I am home, too. She loosened the belt to her jeans, and, glancing eagerly once more at the darkened apartment, relaxed, letting her fingers play against the grip of the 9 millimeter that rested on her stomach, beneath the blanket. Its heft, as always, reassured her. She was confident. She dismissed the thought that had troubled her much of the evening. She knew that she was a policewoman and that there was something terribly wrong about her becoming a criminal.

  But only briefly, she said to herself. Expediency.

  She cleared the thought from her mind.

  Then she closed her eyes to the night.

  Her dreams, though, were unsettling, flooded with disjointed combinations of people: her husband and Sadegh Rhotzbadegh, the Jeffers brothers and her bosses and her father. When the headlights of a car passing by awakened her, just before dawn, she was relieved. She glanced at the taillights of the car as it slipped through the gray darkness. She could just make out the red and blue light bar on the roof, and for an instant she wondered what sort of sleepy cop could miss someone alone in a car parked on a residential street. What’s the purpose in patrolling if you can’t see the unusual? But she was glad that she hadn’t been spotted, though she knew that her own badge and brusque manner would have been sufficient explanation.

  She watched the red lights disappear around a distant corner. They glowed brightly for an instant as the patrolman touched his brakes, then slid from her sight. She stretched and looked about her. She bent the mirror toward herself and straightened her appearance as best she could. Then she bent down and hunted about for the thermos of coffee and half-eaten Danish that she’d brought along. The coffee was lukewarm, but better than nothing, and she sipped it slowly, trying to pretend it was steaming hot.

  She saw the branches on the trees around her slowly etch themselves against the morning light. First one bird chirped loudly, then another. The shapes of the houses seemed to stand out stark and bare as morning took hold.

  She reached down and felt her stomach where the thick round welt of the bullet scar hid beneath her shirt. The patrol car passing, the pre-dawn quiet, all triggered her own memory. She thought of the experience of being shot; it had still been dark, but close to the end of the graveyard shift. There were aspects of the entire act that remained a mystery to her. The whole event had happened in some other time frame: some parts were speeded up, played out with dizzying quickness; others seemed slowed to a foggy crawl.

  She had spotted the two kids.

  They had been walking briskly down the opposite street with a hasty purposefulness that was electric to any police officer with more than a few minutes of experience.

  “Now that couple has got to be wrong,” she had said to her partner. The teenagers were wearing high-top sneakers. “They’ve got their second-story shoes on,” she had added, “and unless there’s some roundball game going on at five a.m. that we don’t know about . . .” He had looked over at the two boys for a few seconds and nodded his head.

  “Can’t you just smell the B and E?” he had laughed. “C’mon. Let’s bust them quick and head in.”

  She had called it in: “Dispatch, this is unit fourteen-oh-one, we’re fifty-six at the corner of Flagler and Northwest Twenty-first. We have two suspects in a two-thirteen in view. Request backup.”

  She always liked the authority that slipped into her voice speaking the particular codes of the patrol officer. There had been static, momentarily, on the radio, as her partner had steered the car into a U-turn and cruised up behind the two boys. Then the dispatcher had acknowledged their call, telling them that backup was en route.

  They were only a few feet behind the teenagers, who hadn’t turned to notice them, when her partner had hit the flashing lights. “This’ll wake them up,” he had said.

  It did. They both had jumped and froze. She had seen that they were both in their early teens.

  “Kids,” her partner had said. “Christ.”

  They had stepped from the car and started to approach the pair.

  “I wonder what they stole?” her partner had asked idly.

  She thought of those words often: your life.

  She had not seen the gun until it was leveled at them. They were only a few feet distant. She remembered struggling, trying to reach her service revolver, while her partner threw his hands out in front of him as if he could ward off the shot. The gun barrel had flashed and his arm had knocked into her as he was thrown back. She remembered seeing the weapon turn, as if it were unattached to anythi
ng, and face her. She sometimes believed that she could see the bullet as it was fired and as it had traveled the space between her and the gun.

  Then she remembered lying on the ground and looking up and realizing that it would be morning soon and her shift would be ending and she would be able to go home and read the paper over a leisurely breakfast. She had planned to do some shopping that day; perhaps it had been a change in temperature, but she had decided to buy herself something slinky and sexy, even if she never wore it. The names of the stores had flashed into her head. All the time she had thought these things, her hands had been searching for her stomach, and she was able to feel sticky hot blood pumping from her.

  Her eyes had focused on the slowly lightening sky, and her breathing had become shallow and she remembered seeing the two teenagers hover into her line of sight. They had stared down at her, meeting her eyes. She had seen one lift the gun and she thought then of her family and friends. But instead of firing, the teenager had dropped the weapon, cursing, and run away. She always remembered the sound of their sneakers slapping away, growing fainter in the distance as the cacophony of sirens had enveloped her, promising her a chance at life.

  In the car, she turned away from the memory and watched a paperboy weave his way, first right, then left, up the street on his bicycle, tossing newspapers onto front porches with practiced familiarity and confidence. He spotted Detective Barren and after a momentary look of surprise, smiled and gave her a wave. She rolled down the window and asked, “Got any extras?”

  He stopped the bike. “Actually, yeah, just today, I’ve got one. Old Mr. Macy down the street’s on vacation and I forgot. You wanna buy his?”

  She fished a dollar bill from her pocketbook.

  “Here,” she said. “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks, lady. Here you go.”

  He pedaled off, waving.

  The lead headline was more trouble in the Middle East. There was a picture of rescue workers pulling bodies from a wrecked building, victims of a suicide-car bomb. Below that was the national lead, a tax bill in Congress story. There were two crime stories on the front page, opening day in the trial of a reputed mob boss, story and photo of the man walking up courtroom steps, and a local crime story. She read this one first: A homeowner had surprised a burglar breaking into his house and had shot the unarmed man dead with an unregistered and hence illegal weapon. Prosecutors were still undecided whether to indict the homeowner or give him a medal.